Re: [ga] RE: Consensus on consensus?

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

Sotiris:

I think if you trotted yourself down to your friendly neighborhood library and
checked out the book cited below you'd change your mind.  As a matter of
fact, most of the things that we do every day of our lives are based on consensus,
among neighbors, friends, local authority, the folks at church, etc., etc.  Especially
in the last of those listed there is soon developed great reluctance to try to carry
out "gang rule" (though some will try, as in any "local politics"), given the context
and the moral climate that the parties function within and are expected to honor.

icannatlarge.com, incidentally, is all about setting the appropriate moral climate
and mind set as to what the members have a right to expect from one another,
and so far it is doing quite well.

The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement
prepared by The Consensus Building Institute (Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks,
London, New Delhi, 1999), Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, Jennifer Thomas-
Larmer, Eds.

It sets out one of the basic premises of Best Practices, and all of these can be seen at http://www.cerebalaw.com/BPIial.htm.

Bill Lovell

Sotiris Sotiropoulos wrote:

> William S. Lovell wrote:
>
> > David Johnson, I might add, does understand what "consensus" means:
> > "It's not about empowering a new regulatory structure. It's about talking
> > (hopefully, mostly, online) until we can figure out what most of those
> > involved DO agree upon. It's about... consensus."
>
> "Consensus" is about gang rule: the most organized gangs rule [period].
>  Anyone dreaming that "consensus" is a viable and valid form of decision
> making is either deluding him/herself or trying to delude others.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Sotiris Sotiropoulos
>         Toronto, Canada
>
> --
> Decision-making on major issues is now vested in international institutions which are so remote from public influence, that the public has no idea what's going on. I mean, in the case of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), incidentally the Labor Advisory Committee report was never reported in the press, right, I'd be surprised if any of you know about it, here's a case where the government radically violated the law, demonstrated utter contempt for the democratic process, rammed through a secret executive agreement of enormous influence, wouldn't even let the one popular group that is supposed to see it by law, the labor- based group, even look at it, they write the report, and then the press censors it. All right, here we have the ultimate in the destruction of democracy, the ideal that everybody's been dreaming of. Not only is the rabble excluded, they don't influence policy, but they don't know what's in policy, and finally they don't know that they don't know. Virtually nobody knows that they don't know what is going on. Well, you know, now we've reached the ultimate. That's the ultimate possibility in the destruction of democracy.
>
> -Noam Chomsky, "Old Wine, New Bottles: Free Trade, Global Markets and Military Adventures"
> the above article in its thoroughly engrossing entirety can be found at: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9302-uva.html
>
> ****


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